Our Greenhouse is fully operational, providing students with hands-on science experiences in a "get your hands dirty" gardening context. There are various grade level activities scheduled.
One of the planned projects for eighth graders includes a vegetable garden. Students will be planning, planting, and caring for their House's vegetable garden. The fresh, organic, local, produce will be used for special meals in the school cafeteria and donated to the Montclair Food Pantry. Students will also investigating the life cycle of bulbs, and planting Fall bulbs for Spring flowering.
Seventh grade students will be discussing nutrition of food, processing of food, and growing both organically and locally. They will learn to identify herbs in the garden in a sensory learning experience. Students will focus on flowering gardens: plant reproduction, seed harvesting, and flower bed preparation. A garden redesign will culminate the studies.
Studies of the pigments in leaves responsible for fall foliage color, which continues on with composting, soil testing, soil abatement. Students will learn how to propagate plants using the Greenhouse gardens as an outdoor learning lab. Studies of gardens from different cultures, will be the a portion of the course for sixth graders, including a Zen garden study.